Affordable Care Act

Whiting Sorrell is Director of Operations, Policy and Planning Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Health Department, former Director Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services and former Billings Area Director, Indian Health Service

This week I will celebrate my 58th birthday. Most women in Montana would not consider this a milestone in their lifetime, but for me, I will celebrate it with vigor as I know how fortunate I am just to be alive. According to a Montana Department of Health and Human Services report, as an Indian woman in Montana, I can only expect to live to be 64 years old. Indian women die a generation younger than non-Indian women, who can expect to live 20 years longer. This statistic has been my personal reality as my mother died at 57 and her mother died in her forties.

Montana Republicans are touring the state to say that they’ve finally found the alterative to the Affordable Care Act they’ve been searching for: legalizing religious insurance ponzi schemes. Republicans are hosting seminars on the scheme across the state, the latest was in the Flathead, as you…

TEA Partiers briefly went nuts this morning. That’s because a D.C. circuit court’s three-judge panel ruled that Congress did not intend for anybody in states that use the federal healthcare.gov marketplace to get the insurance subsidies available to people in other states. But the frenzied celebratory consumption of snack…

Steve Daines is so eager to push is far right ideology that he’s taken to lying to do it. He recently tweeted that the Affordable Care Act is “leaving 11 million Americans with higher premiums,” but left out the fact that here in Montana, insurance…

A Montana state senator and professor of economics is calling foul on GOP Attorney General Tim Fox for obscuring the facts about an initiative that would cost the state billions and eliminate health care for 100,000 of the state’s poorest children. The state lawmaker and…

You’ve heard this conservative theory time and again: Poor people are driving up the cost of health care by using too much of it. Here’s how the conservative story goes. Medicaid needs to be reformed to make the poor “pay” for more of their care….

Hunting with Silencers v. General Nutjob A wild GOP primary will soon be underway in Bozeman, where two Tea Party hotheads are going to tangle for a state house seat in a very conservative district. This will be a heavyweight bout. The challenger is Matthew…

As guest poster Moorcat wrote recently, “the ACA does have real problems that no one seems interested in talking about or even recognizing. Everyone is so focused on the brainless drive to repeal/defund it because it is “evil” or to defend it because it is…

That state legislator Fred Thomas (R-TEA Ravalli County) is outraged about Obamacare is not news to anyone. What’s ridiculous is that the problem he’s so worked up about is one of his own creation. Instead of directing his outrage at the television cameras, he should look…

Another problematic story on the Affordable Care Act yesterday. A Montana Public Radio report by the usually excellent reporter Dan Boyce purports to show “How Obamacare is compromising state university student health insurance plans.” However, the article does not support the claims made in its…

You can’t pick up a rock these days without encountering a misinformed mob of RWNJs repeating Fox News anger points about the Affordable Care Act. The main themes lately are cancelled junk plans and bad information about prices. First, we go to the right-wing media…

If a career at Hardees or Jimmy John’s is in your future, take a second look Flathead Valley Community College. That school is taking a cue in business practices from two low-end fast food outlets–cutting worker hours to avoid having to offer health care. As…

[Note: This is a guest post by independent political blogger Moorcat, who has written some recent popular posts on Cowgirl about the Affordable Care Act.] This evening, my wife received an email from Steve Daines – our lone House of Representatives Congressman. In this email, he…